I would like to report that now, 4 months later since reporting this, I still get immediate crash to desktop when trying to render H264 .mov file with Fusion 9.0.2. I still can not use Fusion 9 and have to stay at version 8 because of this. Very unfortunate.

it has been now half a year since I reported this, yet the latest Fusion 9 version is still 9.0.2 and I still get crash to desktop 100% of the times when I try to render H264 MOV. This should definitely be addressed.

Adding on to this because I have noticed a pattern of H264 as well. Work without it is doing okay, however I am still experiencing massive crashes. Fusion will show 200MB of RAM used during a render, but my Mac will be run completely out of memory.

As I've been working more through the issues, I have found something interesting.

Fusion is limited in the preferences to 70% of RAM for caching. When playing back or rendering, Fusion shows in the bottom right that it is never using more than 4000MB of RAM. However, when looking at my system monitors, it shows that almost all of the RAM on the system is used, and it continues to get eaten up as Fusion plays back or renders.

If I stop rendering or playing, RAM stops being eaten. When I close the comp however, the RAM is not released, and still shows as being fully consumed.

Here's a screenshot of one of the compositions, however it is very important to note that crashes seem to be completely unrelated to the node graph contents. Only common factor in all of the crashes is presence of a saver node with output format set to H264 mov. For example, it crashes in this super simple comp I use to just dump JPG previz sequences into movs:

Try deleting the preferences file and also check the path you are trying to save.

I did a complete reinstall of Fusion from scratch, with all the preferences wiped clean everywhere. Did not help. In fact I did a complete Windows reinstall as I bought a new NVME SSD drive, and the issue was still happening even after the fresh Windows reinstall. That made me certain it has nothing to do with for example QuickTime player codecs.

Sander de Regt wrote:What happens if you render only 1 single mov? Does it still crash?Because in your example there are a lot of savers.

Yes, that was just an example of a simple comp where it crashes. I can literally get it to crash with just a single loader and a single saver in fresh new comp.

Honestly, people repeatedly asking about different conditions is getting a bit old. There is one common factor that causes ANY comp to crash REGARDLESS of it's contents, setup or complexity. That common factor is a saver that is set up to export H264 mov. That is it.

No, amount of savers does not matter.No, there are no other specific nodes causing the crash.No, Fusion 8 does not crash in H264 export.Yes, Fusion 9 crashes in 100% of the cases.Yes, I do have latest GPU drivers.Yes, I did try to install ffMPEG codecs.Yes, I did try to install quicktime.Yes, I did try to uninstall Fusion 9, remove all the saved preferences and reinstall it from scratch.Yes, I did test it on another computer, still crashes.Yes, I even did try it after a fresh Windows reinstall.Yes, I did try to set rendering to just one thread.Yes, I did try to disable OpenCL.Yes, I did try to other codecs than H264 and none of them crash.etc...

The reason for all the questions is because there is evidently something wrong in your configuration, or you're doing something that's enough of a corner case that most of us don't encounter it. We need to understand what the difference is between what you do and what we do before we can put a finger on what causes the crash.

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As you can see, I can render h.264 just fine. If I try to render an unsupported format (1920x1081, for instance), I get an error in the console: Bad file descriptor.

I can't make Fusion crash just by rendering h.264. Others who are trying to help you also cannot do it. So the best we can do is to theorize and ask questions to try to disprove the theories.

Bryan Ray wrote:The reason for all the questions is because there is evidently something wrong in your configuration, or you're doing something that's enough of a corner case that most of us don't encounter it. We need to understand what the difference is between what you do and what we do before we can put a finger on what causes the crash.

Untitled.png

As you can see, I can render h.264 just fine. If I try to render an unsupported format (1920x1081, for instance), I get an error in the console: Bad file descriptor.

I can't make Fusion crash just by rendering h.264. Others who are trying to help you also cannot do it. So the best we can do is to theorize and ask questions to try to disprove the theories.

Yes, I get that, but if I explicitly state several times in the thread that my crash is 100% reproducible regardless of what the contents of the comp are, and that it crashes even with just a single saver, is it really worth asking me again if it crashes with just a single saver?

As for the configuration, my bet goes on combination of high end GeForce GPU with newer drivers. That's what seems to be common across all the people experiencing crashes I know of. In my case, it's GTX1080Ti with latest drivers.

Yes, I get that, but if I explicitly state several times in the thread that my crash is 100% reproducible regardless of what the contents of the comp are, and that it crashes even with just a single saver

Sorry, but we're only trying to help you. Before I asked the question about the single saver, you hadn't mentioned that specifically. The only example you gave was with a dozen loaders/savers which is hardly a single one (or a simple comp I/O wise). You state below that you hardly visit this forum, but still you criticize others who do come here all the time and are just trying to triage the situation.It's *my* time that I'm spending on *your* problem. Sure all those questions can be annoying but since we can't reproduce it on our systems, you should contact support directly. That's what they're here for and maybe they can find the very rare situation that causes this.

Yes, I get that, but if I explicitly state several times in the thread that my crash is 100% reproducible regardless of what the contents of the comp are, and that it crashes even with just a single saver

Sorry, but we're only trying to help you. Before I asked the question about the single saver, you hadn't mentioned that specifically. The only example you gave was with a dozen loaders/savers which is hardly a single one (or a simple comp I/O wise). You state below that you hardly visit this forum, but still you criticize others who do come here all the time and are just trying to triage the situation.It's *my* time that I'm spending on *your* problem. Sure all those questions can be annoying but since we can't reproduce it on our systems, you should contact support directly. That's what they're here for and maybe they can find the very rare situation that causes this.

Well the reason I gut frustrated was that I've provided a lot of information about the issue, for example that it crashes in 100% of the cases and contents of the comp do not have any effect on it. I'd assume that would include also the amount of savers.

I also help other people on many other forums, but I personally understand that someone, who's struggling with some issue for a while already, and provides reasonably detailed description of the issue, will probably not be happy about answering same or similar questions all over again, so I usually take a time to read the original post, then read replies under it, and then think about the issue for a moment before I start shooting from the hip.

michael vorberg wrote:as it seems that no one else can reproduce this behavior leads to the conclusion there is something strange on you system

does it only crash with a loader->saver or also if you try to render a fastnoise or plasma into a h264?

it tried now several combination on my system (win10 pro, fusion free) and non made fusion crash.

i tried different resolutions with different bit depth, different settings in the h264 panel.

To be honest its not just his problem. It crashes a lot with different scenarios on my machine too.Sometimes even using the aforementioned h264 output i posted before.Its just quite hard to nail down whats happening.

I'd like to apologize to anyone who tried to help me in this threaded. I got a bit hot headed past few days and Fusion constantly crashing did not help. That, however, doesn't justify me directing anger at people trying to help me.

so I can confirm this. I do not crash as soon as I use h264 supported resolution, such as 1280x720 or 1920x1080. That, however, is very constraining, since I often need to render non standard and/or non 16:9 resolutions. Fusion 8 is able to dump any resolution into h264.

I am seeing this same issue on my Windows 10, AMD 1700X, 16GB Ram, RX580 8GB system. I am using a standard standard resolution of 1920x1080 at 30 frames. I try outputting to mov and tries to create the move (ends up being blank) and then crashes.

I'm rather new to Fusion and I don't know if this will help anyone, but after several days of struggeling with the render node and having the same issues as you I just fixed it...

... by changing the the save location to my desktop. *facepalm*

It was previously set to a folder on my extern HDD. Maybe this is a stupid solution because I am stupid for not trying something like that earlier, but I'm gonna leave it here anyway in case it helps someone.

JaneParker wrote:I'm rather new to Fusion and I don't know if this will help anyone, but after several days of struggeling with the render node and having the same issues as you I just fixed it...

... by changing the the save location to my desktop. *facepalm*

It was previously set to a folder on my extern HDD. Maybe this is a stupid solution because I am stupid for not trying something like that earlier, but I'm gonna leave it here anyway in case it helps someone.

So I'm not crashing per-se. But I'm having a very similar issue on my desktop where they were exporting fine on my laptop. I'm exporting 4 Prores 422 HQ files from DNxHD footage on PC that I exported from After Effects. Initially, the exports seemed to be going fine until I went to watch the exports and realized it had only exported the first couple of seconds from each clip. From then on, the saver failed every time at frame 0. As far as I know nothing had changed.

I tried your suggestion to change the save location to my desktop. While it no longer failed at frame 0, it only gets to frame 61 or so for each clip before I get the "Bad file descriptor" again.

I just got a popup from my video card that an update is available. I'll update it and try again, but somehow highly doubt that's the issue, specially since Fusion has been all but abandoned and not seen an update in ages.